11 ms·

When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

111 points by tehabe 10y ago

arcanus 10y ago
> A man in the suburban South watched a chimney fire burn his house to the ground as he waited for the fire department, which billed him anyway and then sued him for $15,000 when he did not pay. Is one typically billed when you have the fire department arrive? I thought it was a public good.
- pmx 10y ago
  There has to be more to this story.. can't be that simple can it? ?
  - illumin8 10y ago
    This is a well reported story. Federal law only requires towns to provide a basic education to K-12 students. Anything beyond that like police, fire, and ambulance service, is not mandatory. If you choose to live in such a place, be prepared to be completely self sufficient.
- illumin8 10y ago
  It's a good question, but many of these rural southern towns are very poor, and governed by conservative ideologues that have privatized all non-mandatory services. These towns are required by federal law to provide school service to children within them, however, anything else like police, fire, and ambulance services are not required. I think it's truly a shame that this has led to predatory practices by private companies who charge "fire insurance" rates of $500 a year, and charge exorbitant rates to people who might innocently dial 911 while their house is burning and don't have insurance. For what it's worth, this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts), but if you get far enough into the poor rural southern states, it really is like a 3rd world country.
  - weisser 10y ago
    > this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts) Much of the interior of the US could be described as civilized...
    - freditup 10y ago
      Sexism, racism, homophobia, jingoism, etc are all considered unacceptable and politically-incorrect, but for some reason condescension and unjustified attacks are A-okay when it comes to certain regions of the US. I don't really understand this, although my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority.
      - arcanus 10y ago
        > my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority As well as good old fashioned, 'fear of people with different values and culture than your own'
        refurb 10y ago
        Reminds me of a guy I knew in San Francisco. He was talking to a friend of mine who grew up in Georgia and was Indian (South Asian). He starts off with "Wow! That must have be tough growing up as an Indian in Georgia! Those guys are so backward." My friend replies "Actually, I had a great childhood. Never had any problems being Indian. Georgia is a great place to grow up." Of course the guy from SF had never actually been to Georgia.
        gozur88 10y ago
        That's pretty normal. I hear people who've never been south of the Mason-Dixon bashing the South on a regular basis. They get all their information from coastal journalists. Who've never been there either. These are the same people who would bristle if you said something bad about people in another country and say "How do you know? You can't understand a place by reading about it in the newspaper."
- gozur88 10y ago
  Depends on where you live. In some areas you pay for something akin to fire insurance - a yearly fee that covers fire service. You don't have to pay, but the fire department isn't under any obligation to help you if you don't. And if you engage their services on an as-needed basis it's going to be very expensive.
  - jimmaswell 10y ago
    Someone shouldn't be able to opt out of fire insurance - a fire can start more fires and have other repercuasions beyond the owner's property
    - gozur88 10y ago
      I think they still come and put the fire out. They just bill you for it.
    - jschwartzi 10y ago
      In that case it's called a property tax.
- Lazare 10y ago
  A "public good" is, technically speaking, one which is "non-excludable and non-rivalrous". In a dense urban area, firefighting is clearly a public good, because to stop the building owned by Paying Client A burning down, you need to stop the building next door owned by Non-Paying Client B burning. You can't just stand around and make sure it doesn't spread across the property line to paying clients. Or to flip it around, paying firefighters to fight your fire benefits everyone around you. In non-urban areas, at least if there's no serious risk of wildfires, firefighting is clearly not a public good. If your farmhouse start to burn, it's not going to threaten anyone but you, and paying firefighters to save it doesn't benefit anyone but you. And in a (rare?) case of economic theory working in practice too, that's what we often observe: Rural fire departments often require fees to be paid, and won't fight fires if you haven't paid up. (That being said: Just because rural firefighting isn't a public good doesn't mean it shouldn't be communally funded out of general taxation. Lots of what governments spend their money on aren't actual public goods.)
- mnarayan01 10y ago
  > Is one typically billed when you have the fire department arrive? I thought it was a public good. It's complicated. Unincorporated areas will often (depending on the state) leave firefighting to nearby municipalities, which will generally charge a periodic fee for coverage and bill property owners who do not pay the fee if/when they respond. Even some municipal corporations (e.g. towns, etc) do the same thing, though generally only in quite rural areas. My impression is that it's generally pragmatic rather than ideological: most of us live in densely populated areas, but (in the US), most space is very sparsely populated.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  There's the historical lesson of the fire brigade of Cassius: http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/a/crassus.htm http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/a/crassus.htm Crassus won a reputation for himself as a soldier in Sulla's campaigns in Italy (83), but fell out of favour because of his excessive greed in purchasing estates at knock-down prices during Sulla's proscriptions of his political opponents. Another source of his wealth was buying up property at risk from fire very cheaply and only then putting his private fire brigade into action. Other sources of his wealth were mines, and his business buying slaves, training them, and then re-selling them. In these ways he came to own most of Rome and increased his fortune from 300 talents to 7100 talents. (A talent of silver is approximately 32kg, worth about 9 years of labour, so 7,100 talents would represent some 63,000 years of labour income. Very rough modern equivalent, about $2 billion, based on labour.)
- rwallace 10y ago
  I'm surprised nobody is mentioning the elephant at the dining table here. A 15k bill for saving your house is arguably fair. But in this case, there was a 15k bill for not saving the man's house. What form of corruption has brought about a legal system that enforces bills when the service was not provided?
- a3n 10y ago
  As the article implied, a lot of people think so. But it varies.
nkrisc 10y ago
Privatization sounds great when you can afford your own private services. Otherwise, tough luck, pull on those bootstraps harder.
- hackuser 10y ago
  Also, privatization often means: Give big government contracts to the campaign donors of the politician pushing privatization.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Oh so very much this. Also the IPO antics when a formerly public service is made into a private company...
- stevendhansen 10y ago
  The only alternatives to privatization I can see are: 1) force the population to collectively pay for these services or 2) force specific individuals to provide these services for free Option 1 is morally questionable and option 2 is a type of slavery, so it seems privatization isnt quite as bad as the alternatives. At least with a privatized service those who wish to opt out, can.
  - SolaceQuantum 10y ago
    Wait, why is it morally questionable that a society comes together to, uh, pool resources and do social things? We are a social species. It makes sense that a social species pools resources together for the good of their collective whole.
  - arcticbull 10y ago
    Remind me, how is the collection of taxes to pay for services in the public interest 'morally questionable'? The fire department in particular is such an obvious case because a fire affecting one property can easily spread to the next -- and so on. Is that something you want to happen because the property owner of the first house couldn't afford the fire department? That's morally questionable.
hackuser 10y ago
Free market enterprise requires, AFAIK, 'creative destruction' (business failure, freeing resources for new enterprises) and distribution of goods to those who can pay more. Therefore, I don't think it's a good solution when the specifications are that the institution cannot fail (e.g., you can't have the police department go out of business or otherwise fail to provide services), and when its good should be distributed regardless of ability to pay (e.g., voting, fire protection, etc.).
- humanrebar 10y ago
  So why not fix the problem at the demand side and not the supply side. If people can't afford essential-to-life services, isn't that the problem? While I'm on the subject, centrally planning and allocating the services doesn't really solve the problem of whether it's worth the cost to have one ambulance to serve a town of five people who live in the middle of nowhere. Someone still has to make the decision. We can contrast the ways to make the decision. In one proposal, the consumers of the services pay free market suppliers for emergency services. Various suppliers compete on features and price for servicing Buford, Wyoming (population 1). It turns out the resident of Buford, Wyoming needs to pay six figures per year to pay for his services. Either he's a Walton and it's not a big deal or he's a normal person and has to move somewhere that normal people can afford to live. Or maybe he signs a waiver stating he understands his home is outside the normal emergency services areas. In another proposal, everyone gets emergency services no matter what. If a town can't afford it, they lobby up (county, state, nation) to a bureaucracy to get the subsidies they need. Eventually the money gets allocated as a line item in a pork barrel rider on the Save Kids with Cancer Act. From then on it's political suicide and a huge waste of political capital to cut the Buford, Wyoming Fire Department from the budget since, relatively speaking, there's not much to gain by being sensible at this level of detail. The guy in Buford, Wyoming gets a permanent six-figure-a-year subsidy for having absolutely no neighbors. Hold on, you say, in proposal B you can have qualified bureaucrats (sorry, experts) picking which towns get services and which don't. In this case, we get to blame 'heartless republicans/democrats/whatever' instead of 'creative destruction'. People still have to decide some towns aren't worth it. But it's no longer people paying for what they use. It's someone you need to hire lobbyists to talk to.
jzwinck 10y ago
In the US a lot of us grew up with the idea that when something really bad was happening you would dial 911 and people would appear very soon to help you. I don't know whether this myth was ever true, but it certainly is not true today. I have called 911 or its equivalent more than a dozen times on three continents. No magic helping people appear within five minutes. Or ten. Usually not twenty either. Sometimes not at all, even when they say they will come. We pay fees for E911 service which includes location of cellular phones. But if you call 911 in Manhattan and tell them you are on 4th Street they will ask you if it's East or West 4th. They will even ask you this if you say you're on 3rd Avenue--an absurd question for a local resident but not for 911 dispatchers who are not locals and do not know local vernacular much less geography. A few days ago the car I was in was robbed while we were driving in Chicago. I immediately called 911. They said they'd send someone so I told them where to find the driver. They called me back 20 minutes later and said they were not coming and that such a crime could be reported by phone only. The driver's phone had been stolen. A fire alarm went off in a commercial building. I called 911. They didn't show up. Forty minutes later I called again. They sent the FD to my house. Not the fire. 911 is broken. Be prepared to take care of yourself.
- gozur88 10y ago
  This must be heavily dependent on where you live. I've called 911 three times in California. All three times the fire trucks showed up in less than five minutes.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    Yep, came across a man standing in a crosswalk in Berkeley who appeared to be dazed and the people with him asked me to call for an ambulance, explaining that the man had been pushed and hit his head on the street. It was probably within two minutes of my calling 911 that an ambulance had arrived and the man was being treated. The other time I called 911 from roughly the same location, the call only rang. I hung up after probably 10-20 rings. [I woke up to the building next to my windows engulfed in 15+ foot flames. I setup the call while evacuating, but cancelled it once we began leaving the building. Made it outside and there were already many engines deployed and actively fighting.]
rayiner 10y ago
The article's focus on the private equity boogeyman is misdirected, for reasons that become apparent if you read far enough: > Private equity gained new power and responsibility as a direct result of the 2008 crisis. As cities and towns nationwide struggled to pay for basics like public infrastructure and ambulance services, private equity stepped in. The budgets of state and local governments around the country are tapped out. Often, that's the result of problems that--though exacerbated by the financial collapse--have been in the making for decades. The relevant question isn't whether private-equity backed police and fire services are better than well-funded public ones.[1] It's whether they're better than the poorly funded or unfunded ones that states and municipalities are able to afford given their budget constraints. [1] Not only is that not the relevant question--it's one the article does not even answer. Nowhere does it provide any concrete analysis of the performance of private versus public fire or ambulance services.
- URSpider94 10y ago
  There's more than enough blame to go around. Part of the issue is that private firms come in and pitch an option to cities and towns by which they can get out of their budget scrape by privatizing schools/fire/jails/traffic enforcement in return for granting a monopoly to a company and allowing them to charge new fees. This looks like an attractive option, rather than raising taxes, but I can't think of a time when I've heard of it working out.
  - Lazare 10y ago
    A lot of privatised systems work very well. Denmark has an almost entirely privatised emergency system; one company alone runs 65% of their fire brigades and 85% of their ambulance services, and it seems to work great. Frankly, this story seems to be "terribly run towns that mismanaged their way almost into bankruptcy and can no longer afford to provide critical services are also terrible at negotiating other contracts too!" Which, you know...yeah?
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      What are the regulations on those emergency services?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mschuster91 10y ago
This is so utterly disgusting. The US should look at Germany, once again: we do have private companies managing medical services - usually awarded in 3-5 year contracts, and e.g. in case of Munich, there are multiple companies in addition to the various NGOs (Malteser, Red Cross, Johanniter). All of them have to provide a standardized set of equipment and education for the personnel. Oh, and there's a law that mandates that on long-term average, every caller has to be served in 10 minutes from call. This is called "Hilfsfrist" and is mandatory for firefighters, ambulances and cops. 911 responders are always in government hands, though.
- wojcech 10y ago
  Amen, but I am starting to think that this is a cultural thing... civil law vs common law, rhinian capitalism vs Anglo-Saxon capitalism. German private does not mean American private, and that is good in my opinion. A lot of people moan about regulations and strong unions(like with the train conducters recently), but forget how important they are society wide
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    > but forget how important they are society wide Even in Germany, the train conductors got a lot of hate, even though Germany has by far the lowest amount of strike days per worker...
arca_vorago 10y ago
Back when I was contracting I got a gig to install and update 911 in cities within about a 50 miles radius. I was appalled at the state of 911 once I saw it from the inside, even with the new system I was installing, which was running on Windows Server 2003 and was obviously poorly secured and tossed together by someone in Dallas who knew .net and knew the old boy system to get the contract. This is one more reason why I try to explain to people that you need to be prepared to take of a problem yourself, because cops and ambulances will just show up and either take you to the hospital or draw chalk around your body. Self defense is an inherent natural right and its one more reason the right to bear arms is so important.
njbooher 10y ago
In Ithaca, NY, Bangs Ambulance Inc. is next door to Bangs Funeral Home.
- JshWright 10y ago
  That's actually not uncommon. Many of the early ambulance services in the US were run by funeral homes, as they already had vehicles capable of moving people lying down. That being said, Bang's is far from a "Wall Street" operation. Like the vast majority of ambulance companies, it's a pretty small mom n' pop shop.
JshWright 10y ago
Interesting that the article doesn't mention the fact that Rural Metro (the second largest commercial ambulance service in the country) was recently bought by Envision Healthcare Holdings, the parent company of American Medical Response (AMR), the largest commercial ambulance service in the country. Rural Metro operations across the country are now in the process of getting their green/yellow ambulances painted AMR red. It remains to be seen what impact this has on EMS in the US, but many folks in the industry were surprised that the sale went through as easily as it did. They were already #1 and #2 by a wide margin, the new combined company is staggeringly huge, with no real national competitor (granted, it does have local competition in most markets).
doctorstupid 10y ago
Lynn Tilton may very well be a sociopath.
xivzgrev 10y ago
I did not realize fire protection was uncovered by taxes. "Many homeowners in Rural/Metro’s jurisdiction did not realize they had to pay for fire protection separately"

111 points by tehabe 10y ago

> A man in the suburban South watched a chimney fire burn his house to the ground as he waited for the fire department, which billed him anyway and then sued him for $15,000 when he did not pay. Is one typically billed when you have the fire department arrive? I thought it was a public good.

pmx 10y ago
There has to be more to this story.. can't be that simple can it? ?
- illumin8 10y ago
  This is a well reported story. Federal law only requires towns to provide a basic education to K-12 students. Anything beyond that like police, fire, and ambulance service, is not mandatory. If you choose to live in such a place, be prepared to be completely self sufficient.
illumin8 10y ago
It's a good question, but many of these rural southern towns are very poor, and governed by conservative ideologues that have privatized all non-mandatory services. These towns are required by federal law to provide school service to children within them, however, anything else like police, fire, and ambulance services are not required. I think it's truly a shame that this has led to predatory practices by private companies who charge "fire insurance" rates of $500 a year, and charge exorbitant rates to people who might innocently dial 911 while their house is burning and don't have insurance. For what it's worth, this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts), but if you get far enough into the poor rural southern states, it really is like a 3rd world country.
- weisser 10y ago
  > this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts) Much of the interior of the US could be described as civilized...
  - freditup 10y ago
    Sexism, racism, homophobia, jingoism, etc are all considered unacceptable and politically-incorrect, but for some reason condescension and unjustified attacks are A-okay when it comes to certain regions of the US. I don't really understand this, although my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority.
    - arcanus 10y ago
      > my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority As well as good old fashioned, 'fear of people with different values and culture than your own'
      - refurb 10y ago
        Reminds me of a guy I knew in San Francisco. He was talking to a friend of mine who grew up in Georgia and was Indian (South Asian). He starts off with "Wow! That must have be tough growing up as an Indian in Georgia! Those guys are so backward." My friend replies "Actually, I had a great childhood. Never had any problems being Indian. Georgia is a great place to grow up." Of course the guy from SF had never actually been to Georgia.
        gozur88 10y ago
        That's pretty normal. I hear people who've never been south of the Mason-Dixon bashing the South on a regular basis. They get all their information from coastal journalists. Who've never been there either. These are the same people who would bristle if you said something bad about people in another country and say "How do you know? You can't understand a place by reading about it in the newspaper."
gozur88 10y ago
Depends on where you live. In some areas you pay for something akin to fire insurance - a yearly fee that covers fire service. You don't have to pay, but the fire department isn't under any obligation to help you if you don't. And if you engage their services on an as-needed basis it's going to be very expensive.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  Someone shouldn't be able to opt out of fire insurance - a fire can start more fires and have other repercuasions beyond the owner's property
  - gozur88 10y ago
    I think they still come and put the fire out. They just bill you for it.
  - jschwartzi 10y ago
    In that case it's called a property tax.
Lazare 10y ago
A "public good" is, technically speaking, one which is "non-excludable and non-rivalrous". In a dense urban area, firefighting is clearly a public good, because to stop the building owned by Paying Client A burning down, you need to stop the building next door owned by Non-Paying Client B burning. You can't just stand around and make sure it doesn't spread across the property line to paying clients. Or to flip it around, paying firefighters to fight your fire benefits everyone around you. In non-urban areas, at least if there's no serious risk of wildfires, firefighting is clearly not a public good. If your farmhouse start to burn, it's not going to threaten anyone but you, and paying firefighters to save it doesn't benefit anyone but you. And in a (rare?) case of economic theory working in practice too, that's what we often observe: Rural fire departments often require fees to be paid, and won't fight fires if you haven't paid up. (That being said: Just because rural firefighting isn't a public good doesn't mean it shouldn't be communally funded out of general taxation. Lots of what governments spend their money on aren't actual public goods.)
mnarayan01 10y ago
> Is one typically billed when you have the fire department arrive? I thought it was a public good. It's complicated. Unincorporated areas will often (depending on the state) leave firefighting to nearby municipalities, which will generally charge a periodic fee for coverage and bill property owners who do not pay the fee if/when they respond. Even some municipal corporations (e.g. towns, etc) do the same thing, though generally only in quite rural areas. My impression is that it's generally pragmatic rather than ideological: most of us live in densely populated areas, but (in the US), most space is very sparsely populated.
dredmorbius 10y ago
There's the historical lesson of the fire brigade of Cassius: http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/a/crassus.htm http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/a/crassus.htm Crassus won a reputation for himself as a soldier in Sulla's campaigns in Italy (83), but fell out of favour because of his excessive greed in purchasing estates at knock-down prices during Sulla's proscriptions of his political opponents. Another source of his wealth was buying up property at risk from fire very cheaply and only then putting his private fire brigade into action. Other sources of his wealth were mines, and his business buying slaves, training them, and then re-selling them. In these ways he came to own most of Rome and increased his fortune from 300 talents to 7100 talents. (A talent of silver is approximately 32kg, worth about 9 years of labour, so 7,100 talents would represent some 63,000 years of labour income. Very rough modern equivalent, about $2 billion, based on labour.)
rwallace 10y ago
I'm surprised nobody is mentioning the elephant at the dining table here. A 15k bill for saving your house is arguably fair. But in this case, there was a 15k bill for not saving the man's house. What form of corruption has brought about a legal system that enforces bills when the service was not provided?
a3n 10y ago
As the article implied, a lot of people think so. But it varies.

nkrisc 10y ago

Privatization sounds great when you can afford your own private services. Otherwise, tough luck, pull on those bootstraps harder.

hackuser 10y ago
Also, privatization often means: Give big government contracts to the campaign donors of the politician pushing privatization.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Oh so very much this. Also the IPO antics when a formerly public service is made into a private company...
stevendhansen 10y ago
The only alternatives to privatization I can see are: 1) force the population to collectively pay for these services or 2) force specific individuals to provide these services for free Option 1 is morally questionable and option 2 is a type of slavery, so it seems privatization isnt quite as bad as the alternatives. At least with a privatized service those who wish to opt out, can.
- SolaceQuantum 10y ago
  Wait, why is it morally questionable that a society comes together to, uh, pool resources and do social things? We are a social species. It makes sense that a social species pools resources together for the good of their collective whole.
- arcticbull 10y ago
  Remind me, how is the collection of taxes to pay for services in the public interest 'morally questionable'? The fire department in particular is such an obvious case because a fire affecting one property can easily spread to the next -- and so on. Is that something you want to happen because the property owner of the first house couldn't afford the fire department? That's morally questionable.

hackuser 10y ago

Free market enterprise requires, AFAIK, 'creative destruction' (business failure, freeing resources for new enterprises) and distribution of goods to those who can pay more. Therefore, I don't think it's a good solution when the specifications are that the institution cannot fail (e.g., you can't have the police department go out of business or otherwise fail to provide services), and when its good should be distributed regardless of ability to pay (e.g., voting, fire protection, etc.).

humanrebar 10y ago
So why not fix the problem at the demand side and not the supply side. If people can't afford essential-to-life services, isn't that the problem? While I'm on the subject, centrally planning and allocating the services doesn't really solve the problem of whether it's worth the cost to have one ambulance to serve a town of five people who live in the middle of nowhere. Someone still has to make the decision. We can contrast the ways to make the decision. In one proposal, the consumers of the services pay free market suppliers for emergency services. Various suppliers compete on features and price for servicing Buford, Wyoming (population 1). It turns out the resident of Buford, Wyoming needs to pay six figures per year to pay for his services. Either he's a Walton and it's not a big deal or he's a normal person and has to move somewhere that normal people can afford to live. Or maybe he signs a waiver stating he understands his home is outside the normal emergency services areas. In another proposal, everyone gets emergency services no matter what. If a town can't afford it, they lobby up (county, state, nation) to a bureaucracy to get the subsidies they need. Eventually the money gets allocated as a line item in a pork barrel rider on the Save Kids with Cancer Act. From then on it's political suicide and a huge waste of political capital to cut the Buford, Wyoming Fire Department from the budget since, relatively speaking, there's not much to gain by being sensible at this level of detail. The guy in Buford, Wyoming gets a permanent six-figure-a-year subsidy for having absolutely no neighbors. Hold on, you say, in proposal B you can have qualified bureaucrats (sorry, experts) picking which towns get services and which don't. In this case, we get to blame 'heartless republicans/democrats/whatever' instead of 'creative destruction'. People still have to decide some towns aren't worth it. But it's no longer people paying for what they use. It's someone you need to hire lobbyists to talk to.

jzwinck 10y ago

In the US a lot of us grew up with the idea that when something really bad was happening you would dial 911 and people would appear very soon to help you. I don't know whether this myth was ever true, but it certainly is not true today. I have called 911 or its equivalent more than a dozen times on three continents. No magic helping people appear within five minutes. Or ten. Usually not twenty either. Sometimes not at all, even when they say they will come. We pay fees for E911 service which includes location of cellular phones. But if you call 911 in Manhattan and tell them you are on 4th Street they will ask you if it's East or West 4th. They will even ask you this if you say you're on 3rd Avenue--an absurd question for a local resident but not for 911 dispatchers who are not locals and do not know local vernacular much less geography. A few days ago the car I was in was robbed while we were driving in Chicago. I immediately called 911. They said they'd send someone so I told them where to find the driver. They called me back 20 minutes later and said they were not coming and that such a crime could be reported by phone only. The driver's phone had been stolen. A fire alarm went off in a commercial building. I called 911. They didn't show up. Forty minutes later I called again. They sent the FD to my house. Not the fire. 911 is broken. Be prepared to take care of yourself.

gozur88 10y ago
This must be heavily dependent on where you live. I've called 911 three times in California. All three times the fire trucks showed up in less than five minutes.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  Yep, came across a man standing in a crosswalk in Berkeley who appeared to be dazed and the people with him asked me to call for an ambulance, explaining that the man had been pushed and hit his head on the street. It was probably within two minutes of my calling 911 that an ambulance had arrived and the man was being treated. The other time I called 911 from roughly the same location, the call only rang. I hung up after probably 10-20 rings. [I woke up to the building next to my windows engulfed in 15+ foot flames. I setup the call while evacuating, but cancelled it once we began leaving the building. Made it outside and there were already many engines deployed and actively fighting.]

rayiner 10y ago

The article's focus on the private equity boogeyman is misdirected, for reasons that become apparent if you read far enough: > Private equity gained new power and responsibility as a direct result of the 2008 crisis. As cities and towns nationwide struggled to pay for basics like public infrastructure and ambulance services, private equity stepped in. The budgets of state and local governments around the country are tapped out. Often, that's the result of problems that--though exacerbated by the financial collapse--have been in the making for decades. The relevant question isn't whether private-equity backed police and fire services are better than well-funded public ones.[1] It's whether they're better than the poorly funded or unfunded ones that states and municipalities are able to afford given their budget constraints. [1] Not only is that not the relevant question--it's one the article does not even answer. Nowhere does it provide any concrete analysis of the performance of private versus public fire or ambulance services.

URSpider94 10y ago
There's more than enough blame to go around. Part of the issue is that private firms come in and pitch an option to cities and towns by which they can get out of their budget scrape by privatizing schools/fire/jails/traffic enforcement in return for granting a monopoly to a company and allowing them to charge new fees. This looks like an attractive option, rather than raising taxes, but I can't think of a time when I've heard of it working out.
- Lazare 10y ago
  A lot of privatised systems work very well. Denmark has an almost entirely privatised emergency system; one company alone runs 65% of their fire brigades and 85% of their ambulance services, and it seems to work great. Frankly, this story seems to be "terribly run towns that mismanaged their way almost into bankruptcy and can no longer afford to provide critical services are also terrible at negotiating other contracts too!" Which, you know...yeah?
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    What are the regulations on those emergency services?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mschuster91 10y ago

This is so utterly disgusting. The US should look at Germany, once again: we do have private companies managing medical services - usually awarded in 3-5 year contracts, and e.g. in case of Munich, there are multiple companies in addition to the various NGOs (Malteser, Red Cross, Johanniter). All of them have to provide a standardized set of equipment and education for the personnel. Oh, and there's a law that mandates that on long-term average, every caller has to be served in 10 minutes from call. This is called "Hilfsfrist" and is mandatory for firefighters, ambulances and cops. 911 responders are always in government hands, though.

wojcech 10y ago
Amen, but I am starting to think that this is a cultural thing... civil law vs common law, rhinian capitalism vs Anglo-Saxon capitalism. German private does not mean American private, and that is good in my opinion. A lot of people moan about regulations and strong unions(like with the train conducters recently), but forget how important they are society wide
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > but forget how important they are society wide Even in Germany, the train conductors got a lot of hate, even though Germany has by far the lowest amount of strike days per worker...

arca_vorago 10y ago

Back when I was contracting I got a gig to install and update 911 in cities within about a 50 miles radius. I was appalled at the state of 911 once I saw it from the inside, even with the new system I was installing, which was running on Windows Server 2003 and was obviously poorly secured and tossed together by someone in Dallas who knew .net and knew the old boy system to get the contract. This is one more reason why I try to explain to people that you need to be prepared to take of a problem yourself, because cops and ambulances will just show up and either take you to the hospital or draw chalk around your body. Self defense is an inherent natural right and its one more reason the right to bear arms is so important.

njbooher 10y ago

In Ithaca, NY, Bangs Ambulance Inc. is next door to Bangs Funeral Home.

JshWright 10y ago
That's actually not uncommon. Many of the early ambulance services in the US were run by funeral homes, as they already had vehicles capable of moving people lying down. That being said, Bang's is far from a "Wall Street" operation. Like the vast majority of ambulance companies, it's a pretty small mom n' pop shop.

JshWright 10y ago

Interesting that the article doesn't mention the fact that Rural Metro (the second largest commercial ambulance service in the country) was recently bought by Envision Healthcare Holdings, the parent company of American Medical Response (AMR), the largest commercial ambulance service in the country. Rural Metro operations across the country are now in the process of getting their green/yellow ambulances painted AMR red. It remains to be seen what impact this has on EMS in the US, but many folks in the industry were surprised that the sale went through as easily as it did. They were already #1 and #2 by a wide margin, the new combined company is staggeringly huge, with no real national competitor (granted, it does have local competition in most markets).

doctorstupid 10y ago

Lynn Tilton may very well be a sociopath.

xivzgrev 10y ago

I did not realize fire protection was uncovered by taxes. "Many homeowners in Rural/Metro’s jurisdiction did not realize they had to pay for fire protection separately"